The present disclosure relates generally to motor drives, and more particularly to systems and methods for testing motor drives.
Electric motors and motor drives are generally used throughout industrial, commercial, material handling, process and manufacturing settings, to mention only a few. For example, in a manufacturing setting, a motor drive may provide drive power to an electric motor used to turn a conveyer belt. A typical motor drive employed with a single or three phase induction motor utilizes power from the power grid, and performs power conversion to produce output power with desired current, voltage, or frequency characteristics. After being built, motor drives are usually tested for quality and developmental assurance.
Indeed, there are numerous tests that are run on motor drives. Oftentimes, the motor drives are tested using a dyne-unit. A dyne-unit may generally refer to a load. More specifically, a dyne-unit may include a generator, such as motor(s) and/or transformer(s), electrically coupled to common bus inverter(s), active front end (AFEs), inductor(s), capacitor(s), and/or alternating current (AC) pre-charge circuitry. Drive unit tests may be performed on the motor drive to determine whether the proper power is being generated and output to the connected dyne-unit (e.g., load). However, it is now recognized that dyne-units are expensive to install and take up a great deal of space. Further, it is now recognized that dyne-units require frequent maintenance to repair the motor(s), further adding to the cost of ownership, and they may be inefficient due to numerous electro-mechanical conversions involved. Accordingly, it is now recognized that there is a need to improve motor drive testing.